No Signal, No Mercy

Crash site Silence

The sky was wrong.

Color bled from it in purples and ash-blue streaks, pulsing like bruises across the heavens. Captain Mira Lorne crawled from the wreckage of the Odyssey-6, her suit sparking at the seams, air hissing from a fracture near her left side. The emergency oxygen reserves flickered to life, and she sat in silence amid the twisted metal and scorched soil of an alien world. Her coms buzzed static. No signal. She tapped the controls again. Nothing.

Her first instinct was to scream, but sound died quickly here—swallowed by windless quiet. The wreckage of her crew’s ship lay in pieces behind her, partially embedded into a slope of blackened rock. No movement. No signs of life.

The Rules of Dying Worlds

Mira was a soldier before she became a pilot. She knew the rules of dying worlds. Rule one: Don’t panic. Rule two: Move before the night comes. She didn’t know how this planet cycled, but the sun—or whatever dim orange star hovered above—was already retreating. Shadows grew longer.

She scavenged what she could: a plasma pistol with two cells, a field ration pack, and a cracked but functional HUD visor. The terrain was jagged and twisted like fossilized coral, and behind the rocks, the world sloped down toward what looked like a valley. In the far distance, glowing blue lines etched across something massive—artificial, maybe. A structure. Possibly shelter. Possibly danger. But there were no other options.

The Death Horizon

Mira descended the slope. Each step stirred dust that clung to her boots like static. Her suit pinged warnings intermittently: radiation spikes, low air, coms failure. She ignored them all. She was used to missions where the objective was simple: make it back.

As she walked, Mira passed something that made her gut twist—a beacon pole, identical to the ones her expedition had used to mark territory. It was half-buried, snapped in two, and scorched. Near it, a helmet lay cracked open, the interior dark and dry. No body. Just the helmet and a smear of red-tinged dust.

She knew then: this wasn’t the first crash. This wasn’t the first crew.

Ghosts in the Silence

It began with a whisper—not sound, but sensation. A crawling chill across the back of her neck, like she was being watched. The visor HUD blinked erratically, then shut off entirely. Her pistol warmed in her hand, a comfort more than a defense.

Movement. She froze. Shadows to the right of the rock line shifted unnaturally, like they bent around something she couldn’t see. Then they were gone. Mira didn’t breathe. The silence pressed down, absolute. She kept moving, not at a run, but not slow either.

She whispered to herself, an old pilot’s chant: “Keep your head, keep your light, keep your breath.”

The Forgotten Colony

The structure loomed larger now—definitely not natural. Its towers pierced the sky like skeletal fingers, glowing with faint bioluminescence. As Mira approached, she saw remnants of human design: cargo containers, rusted ladders, shattered solar panels.

A colony. A failed one. Not marked in any database she’d ever seen. She pushed into the perimeter cautiously, pistol raised. Inside, vegetation—twisted and alien—grew through cracks in the floor, and bio-matter pulsed under translucent glass. Something had lived here. Might still.

At the central hub, she found a functioning terminal powered by some unseen source. Its flickering screen read only one line: “Project Helix: ABORTED.”

The Message That Wasn't Heard

Mira interfaced with the terminal, rerouting power to her coms. Still no signal. But then the terminal accessed a cache—a recording, corrupted but partially intelligible. A man’s voice, ragged and trembling:

"They lied. This world was never dead. It watches. It learns. If you see this—don’t run. Don’t speak. Don’t think like prey."

Static cut in, then silence again. Mira stood frozen. The lights dimmed. Her visor rebooted for a brief moment and showed something behind her in thermal view—tall, thin, almost serpentine. It vanished when she turned.

Night Comes Crawling

She didn’t wait. Night fell like ink spilling across a page, sudden and total. The air grew colder, her breath fogging up the inside of her helmet. The pistol’s light barely pierced the dark, but it was enough to see movement all around the perimeter—shapes darting between shadows, limbs too long, heads cocked at inhuman angles.

They didn’t attack at first. They watched. Studied. She ran, deeper into the colony ruins, finding a sealed chamber—an old curio bay. She sealed the door behind her and backed into the far corner, pistol up, hands shaking.

Outside, something scraped slowly along the wall. Then… nothing.

The Waiting Game

Hours passed. Or maybe just minutes—time fractured here. Mira knew she couldn’t stay. The air in the chamber was getting thinner. She rested, barely, thinking of Earth, of the crew she lost, of the silence that followed.

This world didn’t just kill. It consumed everything—memories, people, purpose. She thought about the message: “Don’t think like prey.” What did that mean? That these things could sense fear? Intelligence? She had to be smarter. She had to outthink them.

Fire in the Void

She emerged with the rising light. The creatures were gone—but not far. Mira moved quickly, rigging the remains of the power core from the colony's generator into a makeshift overload bomb. If she was going down, she wasn’t going alone.

She climbed to the observation tower, the highest point. From there, maybe—just maybe—she could trigger a flare pulse, boost it enough to break through the atmosphere. It was a long shot. But survival was no longer the mission. Revenge was.

No Signal, No Mercy

As the sky brightened, Mira sent the pulse. Whether it reached anyone or not, she didn’t care. Below her, the shapes returned—drawn by movement, by heat, by the scent of something that still resisted.

She grinned under the cracked visor.

“If I’m prey,” she whispered, arming the core, “then you’ll bleed to catch me.”

The tower lit up like a miniature sun, and the last thing she saw was the creatures halting—surprised, perhaps—for the first and last time.

Because out here, in the dead silence of the galaxy… survival was never guaranteed.